I was a sales rep working with my sister when the recession of 1981-82 began to impact my profession.  It wasn’t until it officially ended that it slammed with both fists into the urban and suburban Chicago gift market, where I was making my living selling mostly greeting cards to local stores.  Stores that had been trying to hold out until the recession ended observed how little better business was when it was officially over.  They gave up trying to pay bills they were way behind on and closed their doors.

I lost almost a third of my client base in the 1981-82 period.

The 1990-91 recession is a blur.  I was going through a divorce.  A very large percentage of business was now coming from chains instead of small stores.  As long as the chains bought, business was OK.

I was starting a new profession when the 2001 recession hit.  My small website design firm grew quickly right through the downturn, adding on several new clients every month.  I was in the business of offering small, inexpensive sites to small businesses that didn’t have a website.  It was as if a recession wasn’t even happening.

This recession is feeling like the recession of 1981-82 in that more and more of my clients are taking longer and longer to pay their bills.  Whereas consistently 60 of almost 400 would have not paid their bills at 60 days past date of invoice, this last quarterly cycle it was 115, almost double the usual number of slow payers.  Shops or services serving folks with homes got hit first, beginning last summer.  Rug shops, furniture shops, interior designers, architects, framers, builders, contractors and fix-it guys all got slammed.

The subdivision guys starting going after the single housing builders.  The single house guys started doing renovations.  The renovation guys make do with fix-it jobs.  The fix-it guys were not getting calls.  For the interior designers, it was like the world stopped.  I work with several.  Their phones are not ringing.

Now it’s the restaurants that are most obviously being hit.  In December, the number of party bookings was way down, particularly office parties, with cancellations becoming common.  Many of my clients saw a 40-50 percent drop in business in December.  It’s not just high end, though they seem to be getting hit the worst, but the lower end is losing lunch and dinner business.

And the retailers are getting slammed.  Again, winter months showed 40 percent drops in purchases.

More and more of my restaurant clients are paying me in gift certificates.  One is calling them trade certificates because it’s become so common to pay bills with certificates.  With over $6,000 in restaurant “trade” certificates, it’s becoming necessary that I find ways to convert these into cash or other products or services that I would normally consume.  I would prefer not to give staff bonuses in gift certificates, but it’s now a possibility.

And I’m losing clients at a rapid clip.  Mostly they are trying to manage their website themselves to save money.  Several are going out of business.  Many are more than 90 days past due on their quarterly bills, the point at which I shut off websites to encourage them to pay.  At this time, I’m not shutting down websites.  These are unusual times.

Most of our clients are holding on, waiting for the economy to improve.  In the 1981-82 recession, it took the recession’s ending, with the observation that business was not improving, for stores to close their doors.  I’m not clear that an announcement will emerge anytime soon that says this recession is over.  That being the case, I’m not sure what if any signal or piece of information will tell the businesses I work with that it’s time to close their doors.  When I went through this in the 1981-82 period, they did not provide much warning that they were disappearing.  They owed too many people too much money.  They put up signs offering closeout sales and 50 percent off all products, hoping vendors would not see.

The death of a business is not like the death of a person, though the level of grief for the proprietor and close staff can feel the same.  Nevertheless, the proprietor can start another business.  The staff, with difficulty, can get another job.  The grief at the loss can run deep, but there are other ways to make money.  Shoppers, they can go to another store, eat in a different restaurant.  Sometimes we see the proprietors and staff in new positions.

Still, hard times hurt deep.  It’s looking like these hard times will hurt deep and long.

A profession ago, I ran a repping firm, Lehman and Associates, in Illinois.  I represented close to 100 manufacturers and publishers over 19 years.  The second half of that career, from about 1989–1999, I handled mostly the chains.  My staff worked the sole proprietorships, driving from store to store, hauling in maybe 50–75 pounds of samples, mostly paper.

The paper we carried into shops was mostly greeting card samples, catalogs of greeting cards, calendars and the products of other giftware firms.  We’d spend from a half hour to three hours with store owners going through the product lines, often card by card.

The chains didn’t care to look at samples.  They let me pick out what would sell the best.  What the chains cared about was how much discount they could receive, special terms such as delayed payment dating and free shipping.

Regarding dating, they pretty much paid when they wanted to, sometimes in fewer than 90 days.  Shipping was often free.  Discounts were the painful part.  Those discounts often came straight out of my commission.  I was negotiating with the money I would receive after returns were subtracted.

I would commonly write an order in the winter and get paid three seasons later, with final payment coming through five seasons later after returns had been processed.

My largest clients were Walgreens, Osco, Montgomery Ward and Sears.  Buyers, the people I would work with, sometimes changed jobs.  They would be performing the same buyer job in a new chain, and I followed them to their new position.  I got used to working with a variety of people.  Sitting down to work out a year’s calendar order was a stressful stretch of minutes.  The perhaps 3-hour total I’d spend sitting down with those four buyers would determine three-fourths of my yearly income.

I had great product.  I sold mostly the Far Side page-a-day calendar to these various chains.  They often sold completely out.  No returns to deal with, no product that would come off of my commission.  So, as insecure as it was to have such a sizable portion of my annual income come from a single product sold to so few stores, at least that product was something I personally adored and sold well year to year, and it made me a predictable yearly income.

The exceptions to that rhythm, yearly big bucks from a single item sold to very few chains, had a powerful impact.  I don’t remember the year that Montgomery Ward went Chapter 11, but I think it was 1997 or 1998.  I was working with a buyer that I’d worked with at another chain, Carson Pirie Scott, and so I was pretty good at reading that buyer’s nonverbals.

Mark put through his massive calendar order, with a big discount coming out of my commission.  It would be about six months before the order would ship.  Mark’s communications showed signs of stress.  I was getting incongruent messages regarding seemingly unrelated issues.  I’d worked with many businesses before they went bankrupt, observing the unique dance of self denial and secrecy.  This was feeling bad.

I started keeping copious notes regarding communications, dating the various comments made.

I consulted with the publisher, and I noted worrisome behaviors.

Several hundred thousand dollars of product landed on the Montgomery Ward shipping docks.  Two days later, they declared Chapter 11.  They refused to return the product.  They refused to put the product out.  The buyer became very hard to get hold of.

In May of 1999, I departed that profession and began the web design firm about six months later.  I wanted a business model that would not have me relying upon large corporations.  The Montgomery Ward debacle cost me a sizable portion of my income.  In addition to anxiety, there was little experience that what I had to offer was appreciated.  I was looked at as the guy that would negotiate discounts.  Unlike my firm’s relationships with the small stores, I was not valued for the knowledge I could bring about our industry and its products to help our clients make a living.

When I structured the website design firm business model, it was grounded on the idea of having lots of small clients in a relatively small area, clients who I could help and be important to.  I wanted to be appreciated in the way that small stores valued our contributions when I had managed a repping firm.  It felt good to be appreciated.  Life was lots less stressful.  So, I developed a business model where what I offered regarding website design, maintenance and marketing could be useful and valued by our clients.  I sought a business plan that nurtured long-term relationships with many smaller businesses.

And so that is how we’ve done it.  Of the almost 400 clients paying us quarterly maintenance fees, almost none of them are multileveled corporations.  I almost always work with the owner/sole proprietor, making it easy to build websites quickly and inexpensively.  Life is FAR less stressful than when I worked almost exclusively with large corporations.  I don’t make as much money as I did then, and I work far more hours, but there is no comparison.  Working with people whose life you can positively influence, and feeling appreciated for the work you do, is a deeply rewarding experience.

Sometimes it takes a bad experience before you can see a positive alternative, embrace it and move on.

I’ve been guiding Rosanna, my research assistant, on the gathering of information on matrifocal societies across the planet.  We are seeking patterns that support or contest my hypothesis that social structure is directly related to maturation rate, specific disease and condition proclivity, hormonal thresholds, handedness and cerebral lateralization.

A problem is that there is little information about these societies in connection to the variables that we’re tracking.  Few studies have been conducted.

So I expand the list of possibly related features.

Recently added to the list are frequency of twinning, language structures with a heavy emphasis on the present tense and the structure and content of their mythologies.

I am deeply hesitant to get into mythological structures or content.  Even though that is how I originally disappeared into the rabbit hole of this twelve-year project, I don’t see much chance of academics accepting correlations between a culture’s stories and its disease proclivities as being a useful set of connections.

We’re playing a little bit with age of pubertal onset as a relevant variable, but this is often influenced by environmental factors such as diet.  Pubertal onset has vast implications regarding particular diseases and conditions, aesthetic capabilities and social structure affinities.  This connects to the timing of maturation or progenesis in heterochronic theory, which is extremely important in evolutionary processes.  Still, it’s an area I’ve mostly avoided, there being so much else to explore.

If I were an academic, I’d be out there conducting handedness assays in cultures across the world.  I’d love tons of brain scans to accompany those tests.  Evaluating hormone levels over time would be extremely useful, as would changes over time in handedness.

I need more variables from information we could uncover in the existing literature.

In other places on this site, I’ve described my hypotheses that there were specific societal repercussions resulting from the youngest children forming the bulk of immigrating individuals.  The older children tend to stay with or near the family of origin.  This was particularly true up to about five generations ago when inherited land would go to the oldest children and primogeniture laws disinherited younger sons.

I hypothesize that the result was that the United States received immigrants who were both more creative than the status quo and more comfortable within an environment of innovation.  A community’s artists are often made up of the maturational-delayed males (it is my hypothesis that youngest sons are more likely to be maturational delayed), the narcissists and creative types.  Innovators and entrepreneurs often are made up of these risk-takers and societal outsiders.  In other words, the American male classic personality type–creative, selfish, independent and innocent–are features of the maturational-delayed males.  These are the immigrants to America.

This is all conjectural.  Indeed, this site is filled with a vast, interlocking series of conjectures based upon both established studies and unproved hypotheses.  Nevertheless, spying new implications of the foundation thesis and sharing those suggestions is largely what this website is about.

In the previous piece, I outlined the power of a geography-free, barrierless Internet in a context of content providers and users forming commercial relationships based upon the time that a user spends on a provider site.  Micropayments dispersed by a central agency could encourage exponential growth in unique, high quality media, educational and aesthetic content.

Consider that there is a process already underway, not unlike the massive immigrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is putting in contact with one another innovators and creators from across the planet.  Immigrants are not now crossing oceans to enter an environment uniquely conducive to unique productions, invention and creative collaborations.  Instead, users and producers are finding each other on the web.

We are at the very beginning of an innovation explosion, one hardly conceivable in a world driven by consumption, not creation.  Across the planet, young people are flexing creative tendencies while connecting to other young people without the barrier of geography to prevent them from forming alliances with like souls.  As social networking applications and virtual worlds become more adept at teasing out what makes individuals unique, simpatico individuals will find it easier to find one another amongst the throngs or multitudes of individuals a single click away from contact.

The dynamic behind the entrepreneurial fervor of the United States is bursting onto the global stage, except that which is exponentially expanding is not a lust to possess more stuff but a compulsion to collaborate to create.  The Internet is the new commons, the new world.

We are all immigrants in this land.

My fourth profession was as a sales rep selling mostly greeting cards and gifts to shops and chains in the Chicago area.  I’d tried to make it as a girdle and bra factory executive (family business), free lance illustrator and graphic designer and as a publisher of greeting cards (mostly my own illustrations).  The selling of other people’s greeting cards evolved to become a healthy repping firm with several employees covering over a thousand stores across the state.

My undergraduate degree was mostly devoted to fine arts with an emphasis on psychology.  Most of my rep colleagues were about making money, with one exception.

Leo Burke eventually quit repping to eventually become an academic at Notre Dame specializing in alternative business models after having achieved success at humanizing Motorola as an executive specializing in executive interpersonal relations.  A colleague of Ken Wilber, Leo has used his life to offer integrative business models, influenced by Eastern practices of honor and deep appreciation.  Before all that Leo was a sales rep selling greeting cards.

Back in the 1980s, Leo and I were both running repping firms, often both of us selling mildly competing fine arts, post-hippie, new age or aesthetic-driven product lines.  Leo had a gift for finding and repping beautiful greeting card lines.  I pretty much represented anything that would sell, but I did carry some beautiful things.  We both represented a particular repping paradigm.  There were enough unique stores in the Chicago area that neither of us felt compelled to sell anything to any shop.  In addition, we didn’t believe in selling products to a store that we didn’t think would succeed.  We were sales reps with a conscience.  This was possible because we sold unique products in a thriving commercial community, one with few geographic limitations.

The other paradigm was characterized by reps seeking to make the most money that they could from the territory that they represented, often a geographically limited territory, which forced them to make profits from a relatively small area.

Whereas Leo and I would evaluate quickly whether the store we were visiting could profit from our wares, leaving if we estimated it could not, reps with small, limited territories might stay and pursue a possible sale, working the hard and soft sell paradigms to get that sale, spending the time it took to close.  The behemoth of Leo and my industry was Recycled Paper Products.  Over time, RPP made smaller and smaller territories for their reps, forcing them to place their greeting cards in more and more locations.  Recycled’s take-no-prisoners placement practices were loathed by many in the industry.  If reps did not quickly perform, they were fired.

Recycled was a large, hierarchical company with many reps with tiny territories with rep incentives to sell to every store they could.  Leo and I represented many companies and had large territories with incentives to sell only to those stores that could profit handsomely over time.

The two salesmen paradigms have relevance in an area perhaps not obvious until examined from an alternative point of view.  The web has the potential to become a vast, horizontal economic engine distributing wealth to huge numbers, an alternative to free markets that create stratification and the congregation of wealth with a relative few.  The difference in the two paradigms can be examined in the context of the two kinds of salesmen.

With the web, anyone on the planet with a computer, or now a cell phone, can easily find another person with similar interests and can email an invitation to collaborate.  With unlimited access, sharing becomes the default.  With the web, resources naturally seek wide audiences with barriers having disappeared.  This is in direct contrast to resources congregating in the hands of the few at the top of hierarchies.  This is all about geography.  A rep in a small territory is forced to behave in only his or her best interest when resources are limited in a confined space.  A rep in a large territory loses the incentive to spend time convincing a marginal potential customer to behave in a way that may not be in the potential customer’s best interest.

With an unlimited territory and access to information on who is in that territory there is no incentive to behave in any other way than in each party’s best interests.  Taking time to form relationships that can potentially end sooner than later is a waste of time.

The astonishing transformation we are in the middle of now hasn’t really started to take effect.  We are in a transitional phase where limping, large firms are selling consumer products to wounded consumers.  It can soon be time for very small firms or individuals to be selling unique content to users across the planet.

Back when Leo and I were reps, I worked for Andrews & McMeel, syndicator and publisher of The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes products.  I was also a comic artist, published a local comic monthly and attended comic strip and panel conferences.  At one of those conferences I talked with Scott McCloud, wunderkind of the comic industry, a philosopher and engineer of the context and mechanics of the comic arts.

One of the things we talked about was how the emerging web (this was in the 1990s) could create the opportunity for a tidal wave of creativity by rewarding artist sites with micropayments for traffic to those sites.  The comic industry could support thousands instead of maybe 50 comic artists in the U.S. if all the comic artists producing work would have access to their audience in a way that the users could without effort reimburse the creator with a penny for every minute on the site.

This is the Leo model of repping, with an unlimited territory encouraging a large, loyal audience dispersed over a vast plane.  The environment would be characterized by sharing and mutual respect.  No conditions accompany the exchange of assets, other than the presence of the user.  There is no hierarchy, no classic consumer, just the user and content producer sharing space and time.

Consider this model applied to aesthetic productions across the web:  educational pieces, journalistic stories, music, music video, comic art and lectures.

Who would disperse these pennies to get the system started, to prime the pump of the Aesthetic Economy?  What would it take to connect creators and users across the planet in a way that our economy could remarkably transform and people would be employed, manifesting the productions of their imagination?

Begin with government funding.  Get the system up and running.  Perhaps tax nonsustainable goods and services to reimburse the emerging global, integrative, horizontal Aesthetic Economy.

Consider the emergence of an unlimited online geography characterized by universal micropayment commercial access.

When geography disappears, equality becomes not just possible, but ubiquitous.

The company that would do no evil has little heart.  Google’s attention continues to focus on those larger “brands” or corporations that it sees as peers in a global economic landscape dominated by corporate, controlling interests.  Google encourages the status quo in several ways, using conventions that concentrate wealth with the very few.

Google’s famous algorithm encourages those sites with the most incoming links to rise to the top of rankings.  Google has difficulty judging value outside a context of popularity or the simulated popularity that comes with businesses buying links to their sites to get high rankings.  Google theoretically ranks respect.  What it often only ranks is how much money a business is willing to spend to appear to be getting respect.  Or, it ranks how large a corporation has become, presupposing that respect comes with size.

In the Google universe, each planet or business has size and gravity that can be determined by measuring mass.  Google’s algorithm presupposes that mass, respect as determined by incoming links or established brand, is the only variable that determines gravity.  There is more to respect than popularity or power.  Google has no algorithm for measuring integrity.

Google is losing integrity in the process.

Before Google, the local yellow pages served local businesses by being the place where potential customers would seek local products and services.  The Internet has destroyed the yellow pages.  Local businesses are furious at the costs and poor results with yellow pages.  Local firms are moving over to Google Ad Words as one of the few alternatives that approximates what the yellow pages used to offer.  Some of those local businesses are using the services that some of the yellow pages companies are offering whereby the yellow pages becomes the broker for a local business with Google Ad Words.

Google works out agreements with the yellow pages to allow the yellow pages to act as an agent for a local firm, managing what the local firm spends with Google.  The yellow pages drives traffic to a business’s website off of a Google Ad Words listing managed by the yellow pages.

Typically, a store contracts with the yellow pages for $500 a month to bring it traffic from Google.  Usually that traffic goes to a special page created by the yellow pages that allows it to track exact traffic patterns, even noting the number of phone calls if a dedicated phone line is assigned to appear on that page.  There is no transparency.  The store is not allowed to know how much it is spending on any particular visitor.  It doesn’t know how much money went to Google or how much to the yellow pages.  The store can form its own division and figure out how much it is paying for each person that showed up on the page, but it has no idea which search phrases are performing and which are not.  It also has no idea what percentage of the $500 is going toward the yellow pages.  Typically, an Ad Words specialist receives 10-20 percent.  There is no transparency.

In addition, the yellow pages often brokers or handles the account for literally all competitors in a region.  Google bases its Ad Words rates on several factors, the most important being how much money is being spent by the business.  With the yellow pages handling many and sometimes all competitor bids, it is not acting in the best interest of the stores it represents by controlling bids to keep the rates low, but the yellow pages is behaving in its own best interest by pushing bids higher to beef up advertising expenditures.  It is a devastating conflict of interest for the yellow pages to be managing several competitors in a market.  In addition, any local business seeking to buy positions in the Ad Words programs on its own, in those areas that compete with several businesses managed by the yellow pages, ends up paying fees inflated by the yellow pages interventions.

Google, working with the yellow pages to manage this program, takes the low integrity position of siding with the large corporation against the local businesses.  Google and the yellow pages end up making enormous profits because they control the system.  Small business gets screwed.

Will Google be seen as the bad guy when this corporate scam becomes widely known?  I’m thinking likely not.  Most stores I know loathe the yellow pages.  There are several types of yellow pages in many markets.  Not all engage in this practice.  But they’ll all probably be associated with this scandal when it blows.

I’ve been running a web development firm since January 1999.  Google and my firm were born a few months from each other.  By chance, I began tracking Google’s rise shortly after its appearance, noting the efficacy of its search perimeters along with that of its competition.

Though Google was a very powerful tool early in its career, that muscular efficiency has diminished.  That seems due to several factors.

Those folks whose job it is to figure out how Google works to achieve higher rankings often performed their job well, depreciating the searches that Google offered.  Corporations able to pay the most money for professional optimizers tended to get the highest rankings.  Google’s results often showed which firms had the most resources to pay for position.  Google’s algorithms could not distinguish value from money.

Still, if you typed in “Chicago photographer,” you got a list of Chicago photographers on the first page, individuals seeking to sell their services to searchers looking for what photographers had to offer.  That is not the case now.

Google decided to go public in 2004.  On November 15, 2004, they enacted the first of several major algorithm changes, pushing many of the optimized sites from top positions, penalizing websites for using techniques that gamed Google’s evaluation algorithm.  The result was an overnight tripling of Google revenues.  Corporations and businesses formerly paying optimizers for high rankings to appear on the first page of a search were forced to pay Google for their ranking, on the right side of the screen, where Google sold ads.

It became in Google’s best interest that searchers looking for commercial products or services NOT find what they were looking for so that the Google advertising section would profit from the click.

It was clear to me that in preparation for going public, Google was actually seeding its searches with inefficiencies in order to encourage profits.  Regarding commercial searches, it’s only got worse with time.  By embedding top 10 positions with Wikipedia entries, videos and other tangentially related content, commercial businesses continue to be pushed into the second page, forced to pay Google for ad space.

I recently read that Google has decided to place a heavier emphasis on “brand” or conventional corporate websites when deciding how to rank.  It is adjusting its algorithm to make it even more difficult for those businesses without deep pockets to achieve rankings.  One could call this the new oligarchic algorithm.

As a small web developer seeking rankings for small, local businesses, I find the decisions that Google has made over the years have been sometimes fair, sometimes selfish, sometimes in between.  The trend has been toward depreciating its mission of providing useful searches in order to make money while encouraging the corporate status quo.

This has been a particular problem for local businesses seeking business using the Google Ad Words program, where Google derives most of its revenue.  In the next posting, I will explain how Google’s alliances with other large corporations are resulting in a crushing increase of advertising costs to local small businesses.

I am a paid professional specializing in search engine optimization.  I happened into this aspect of my profession by mistake.  I decided to prepare seven town directories for the seven communities just north of Chicago that I was targeting.  There were close to 1,800 retail and service outlets in those towns.  In my usual obsessional fashion, I proceeded to photograph the exterior of the almost 1,100 independent businesses and prepare for each a one-page webpage within one of the seven directories.  Four stores objected.  The rest got a web presence at no charge.  For the chains, I just linked to their national sites.  This was in the year 2000.

The idea was to integrate all local commercial activity onto the web.  For the stores and services that contracted with me to build and maintain a multipage site, I was providing a bonus image with a picture in the directories.  I estimated that to keep the clients, I had to bring them traffic.  The directories performed that job, bringing my clients business (at no extra charge), thus helping to make it possible for me to keep my clients long term.

Something very odd was happening while I built out these directories, linking the prime positions on those pages to my clients.  The directories themselves were achieving top 10 positions in the country for their targeted phrases, such as “catering, crafts, bakery.”

Google was the search engine that liked my pages best.

In the year 2000, I had nine search engines whose results I was tracking when estimating how successful I was at getting high rankings for sites.  I needed a tenth.  Scanning a list of almost 100 small, new companies, the name Google jumped out at me.  I added Google to the list, a company I had never heard of, but I liked the name.

When I noticed that my directories were receiving high national rankings, Google provided my pages the highest positions.  Staring at my monitor at 4:00 one morning, unable to sleep, I saw the patterns.  I saw what I was doing that made Google grant my pages first-page rankings, often #1 positions in the country.

In the meantime, Google appeared as a national player, challenging the established firms, such as Yahoo!.

I started doing deliberately what I had happened upon by chance.

Over a matter of months, I achieved top 10 positions for such terms as “lingerie, mortgages, airline tickets” and many other highly valued terms.  I created a directory called Green Tithe that took the top 10 positions achieved in Google and through affiliate agreements began raising tens of thousands of dollars for environmental organizations.

I was having fun.

The fun ended on 11/15/04 when Google made a radical modification in its algorithm, downgrading the particular techniques I used, techniques that Google had seemed to adore.  I withdrew to working on regional terms where success was relatively easy.

Still, a sizable portion of my income comes by my working with small businesses to achieve high rankings for their sites.  There are six of us working in this small firm.  I’m the project manager, marketing department, sales department, accounting and search engine optimization guy.  I don’t do much design or website maintenance anymore.  I do no tech, pay per click or programming.

I came across this aspect of my profession, search engine optimization, by happenstance.  Much of my life seems to unfold influenced by the totally unexpected.

I emailed to professors a link to “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” and I’ve received several dozen responses.  Mostly folks have said they haven’t read it yet but would get to it or that it’s not exactly connected to their discipline.  Several have suggested I walk the conventional path and submit to peer-reviewed journals.  It has been suggested I specialize in one discipline.  Some expressed enthusiasm for the thesis and have shared it with colleagues.  No minds blown.  Some tentative relationships are forming.

I’m definitely having difficulty translating the thesis into a brief enough format that it’s consumable in a fifteen-minute sitting.  There is a consensus that “Introduction to the Theory of Waves” is trying to do too much in too short a space.  Several have recommended that a book is required.  I’m not seeing the sense in writing a book that no one would read.  First, this website would have to stir a fairly robust response.

This site is composed of hundreds of short pieces, maybe half having to do with the base thesis and evolution, exploring various little parts of the many connected aspects of the thesis.  “Introduction to the Theory of Waves” places maybe 70 percent of those various ideas in a single, condensed, integrated package.  I made it short to increase the chances of it being read.  But the density is a barrier to the ideas being understood.  Nonacademics visiting the piece and leaving comments are expressing frustration and dismay.  Academics rarely leave comments; they send me emails.

I’m feeling flummoxed and occasionally depressed.  Clearly, this is an artistic endeavor, what with my being unable to conduct studies, perform experiments or access the peer-reviewed community of academics.  I survey the literature, collect data and form hypotheses.  Still, I have an experience of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self in a context of my experiencing/observing the creation and coming together of a theory of human evolution that, to me, displays elegance, beauty, symmetry and simplicity.

The simplicity has been difficult to impart.  It has been my experience that I sit (at my keyboard) and watch/listen to the integration of several seemingly unconnected threads of experience and observe their forming intimate relations within a single paradigm.  Simplicity emerges from cacophony.  Yet, I seem unable to communicate this experience.

I experience beauty.  Yet, as an artist seeking to communicate that experience, I mostly fail.

So, I’ll continue to email those professors publishing in fields connected to what I have to say.  With time, I’m hoping that the artist within me will have the experience of sharing the joy of this alternative world view.

I’ll continue to seek a way to make it simple.

“…primary hypogonadism, a condition resulting from the lack of increased production of androgen (testosterone) hormones in the interstitial Leydig cells in the testes at puberty.  Because of this condition, emasculated singers may have been blessed with voices sweeter than a woman’s, but burdened by an infantile penis, an underdeveloped prostate, “eunuchoid” (disproportionately long) arms and legs, beardlessness, pubic hair distributed in the female opposed to the male pattern, and fat deposits on the hips, buttocks, and breast area.”  (Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (1991) Mystery Dance, On the Evolution of Human Sexuality:  Summit Books, New York, p. 67.)

This may seem somewhat arcane, but in my explorations of the patterns and dynamics of neoteny there is a feature that does not appear in the literature on the subject.  This is the elongated legs and arms that appear in people displaying neotenous features.

I first came across a connection in a text that noted low testosterone in males was connected with longer legs.  Bonobo vs. chimpanzee comparisons suggest bonobos have lankier builds and are more neotenous than chimpanzees.  I’ve noted anecdotally that autistic and Asperger’s males seem to display an unusually high proportion of the tall.  Scandinavians are more neotenous in several features, including height.

It seems autism has more than one etiology.  I’ve been exploring autism as a condition connected to male maturational delay and female maturational acceleration.  Height might be an additional marker to help break out different causes.

Blond hair, blue eyes and a lanky build seem connected, all neotenous features.  We might expect a higher proportion of autistic and Asperger’s individuals to display blond hair, blue eyes and height.

Going farther out on this limb, I would expect matrifocal societies to display more height than patrifocal societies, and peoples perhaps 100,000–50,000 years ago, as we first departed Africa, still matrifocal-based, to display more height than societies 10,000–2,000 years ago when patrifocal society became fully engaged.

Right now, I’m Googled out.  Maybe a visitor to this site can bounce around and see if there are correlations.

There is a not politically correct notion that the individuals that make up ancient aboriginal societies are different from contemporary humans.  It is usually assumed that they are different as in less evolved, less intelligent or less capable.  It depends on whom you talk to or what you’re reading.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber attempts to take this issue head on, repackaging the 100-year-old four-fold parallelism that equates human evolution, societal evolution, individual ontogeny and an individual’s psychology.  Wilber does not frame the differences between an individual in an aboriginal society vs. an individual in modern society in negative terms, but seeks to unpack the features of various stages of growth and show how these stages manifest on a number of different scales.  Growth, transformation, evolution, all these aspects of how life manifests over time, display pattern.  Those patterns can be described.  Ken Wilber seeks to describe how those patterns manifest in human society.

My personal focus is the influence of sexual selection on social structure mediated by changes in the rates of maturation.  The patterns I focus on are very specific.  Still, I focus on biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience, the four-fold parallelism.  Wilber is more general in his approach, preferring to show THAT there is a connection rather than HOW the connection operates.  Wilber also focuses heavily on religion and spirituality.  I pretty much stick with Zen.

I’ve written a little bit on similarities between Hopi and Trobriand Islander language structures.  Both have a heavy emphasis on the present tense and both are matrifocal societies.  Two societies a pattern does not make.  So, my research assistants, Rosanna and Elia, are conducting a survey of almost one hundred matrifocal or matrilineal societies across the world, looking for patterns.  The variables we’re tracking are not often studied or noted in the societies we’re exploring.  I want to know rates of left-handedness, twinning percentages, disease and condition proclivities and languages with tense anomalies.

It would also be interesting to know their mythological motifs, myth structures, rituals, societal bans, morays and varying idiosyncrasies.  That’s how I got into this almost 14 years ago.  Fascinated by the origin of dragon myths, I ended up studying ancient serpent myths, finding myself studying ancient matrifocal societies.  Seeking to understand the nature of the transition to our contemporary patrifocal societies from our hypothetical matrifocal roots is how I ended up studying human evolution.  It was through our stories that I began that journey.

At this point in my studies, I’m thinking there IS a major difference between the humans living in our still existing, ancient matrifocal aboriginal societies and what we would call modern humans living in the industrialized world.  I suspect these differences have a neurological, physical and behavioral foundation.  I also suspect that an exploration of the relationship between primary process, which might also be called dream consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives), and autism might be useful as we seek to understand autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay.

If our matrifocal aboriginals experience waking life in some ways like we experience dream, if primary process is familiar to their waking experience or at least very accessible, then perhaps these aboriginals can offer us some wisdom and perspective regarding the surge of individuals familiar with primary process in waking life in the modern world, what we call autism.

It may not be politically correct to equate aboriginals with autistics, but consider that if there is a relationship, then the relationship suggests that a portion of modern society is drifting back to where we started mere tens of thousands of years ago.

Consider that modern times may be crossing a line whereby our future may have much in common with our past.  This might suggest our evolution may be more characterized by a spiral than a linear pathway.  We may be swooping around to a position with much in common with the last time we rounded this bend on the spiral highway.

Our aboriginal colleagues may be in a position to teach us some important things about autism, beginning with:  How do you raise an autistic child?  If a society facile with a landscape characterized by primary process might be integral to a child’s feeling at home within autism, then perhaps we should be observing tribal society closely.

Estimating which society is more advanced becomes an odd notion in our unique, transforming world where time seems in some ways to be changing its direction.

Perhaps my theory of human biological and social evolution integrates biology, society, politics and current affairs in part because my days are spent on the phone, emailing and conferencing with people working within widely varying areas.  I’m in communication with professionals regarding web design, web maintenance, search engine optimization, web marketing, national Left/Progressive organizing, regional events organizing, teaching activists new technologies, discussing evolutionary theory with academics around the world (by email), working with organizations I’m on the board of such as In These Times….  In other words, the scales of experience my theory seeks to integrate reflect the numerous ways my day is divided up as I seek to exercise competency in several widely varying disciplines, changing focus from moment to moment.

In addition, my firm serves over 400 clients in an astonishing variety of businesses and nonprofit organizations.  While maintaining and building skills in web development and website marketing, I have the requirement of developing intuitions for the various businesses and organizations that I serve.  My specialty within my firm is search engine optimization.  It is necessary that I am able to understand all of our clients in the context of the specific phrases required for their website to be easily found on the web.  In my mind, I carry a fairly vast array of word association clusters revolving around search criteria for businesses and organizations in a number of different areas.  Whereas a publicist or media expert might think in terms of pitches or stories, I think about the language conventions people use to find what they are seeking on the web.

This blog receives a small but respectable daily traffic count of 100-200 visitors a day, mostly because it receives very high rankings for the very arcane word clusters associated with the theories represented on the site.  Over time, I expect it will be this avenue that brings in people that have natural affinities with the theory.  The presuppositions of the theory are unorthodox enough that the established 13-page introduction often seems to feel annoyingly unfamiliar to overwhelmed academics.  With over 400 posted entries and over 400 pages on this website, folks are finding this website in a number of different ways.

As divided up as my day is and with my attention assigned to a wide variety of subjects, folks that find me do so through a myriad of doorways, the web providing connections in many ways.

In the United States, we hold societal allegiance to the concept of independence with a reverence for the entrepreneur.  We carry a unifying belief that each hero walks a separate path.  We express confidence that the individual reigns supreme.

We all fervently believe each person should act upon his or her own unique beliefs.

Different authors and theorists have written on how they think this unique paradigm emerged.  Robert Pirsig suggests that American colonists unconsciously embraced indigenous aboriginal character traits, what looked like self-confident, autonomous competence.  I’ve suggested in other pieces on this blog that the youngest sons and daughters were impacted by the influence of old world primogenitor laws.  These landless immigrants were encouraged to congregate in the New World.  (See my hypothesis to review why the youngest would be the most creative.)

There is a paradox that lies at the foundation of what it is to be American that connects to a paradox regarding the youngest son and daughter and the bridge between the youngest children and aboriginal societies.

It can all be summed up in rock ‘n’ roll.

In the early 1960s, with the emergence of undisguised African aboriginal rhythms in modern music, after several decades of their exploration in jazz, we as a society experienced an adulterated neotenization of older societal archetypes into contemporary society, not unlike the biological principle of neoteny where the infant features of our chimpanzee-like forebears prolonged themselves to appear in the adult of their descendants, modern humans.  Just as our species biologically has delayed in maturation over millions of years, society at this time is revealing the same dynamic.  That which is ancient is manifesting in the present day.  Rock ‘n’ roll is but one feature of our ancestors’ society emerging in contemporary times.

This comes with two seemingly contrasting features:  a deep reverence for creativity and a reflexive connection to community.

Emerging modern society, as split as it often seems and feels, is twisting its way around to acquire many of the features of our aboriginal roots.  The United States has led the way in many ways by being a place where the creatives come together, youngest sons and daughters of Old World immigrants mixed with those of aboriginal African descent.

What emerges is a society not bound by ethnicity but by its reverence for celebrating difference.  Innovation becomes the currency of respect.

I’m wrestling with the concept as I write these words, flummoxed by the paradoxical nature of the insight.  As highly stratified, hierarchical and patrifocal as American society seems to be, there also seems to be an argument that the United States is at the vanguard of a surge in innovation and creativity that will result in a horizontal community of creative innovators that embrace interdependence and a reverence for the commons.

We already hold egalitarian truths to be sacred.  All that’s left is to wrest control of assets from the elites.  By reassigning our reverence for the entrepreneur to the creative innovator, the artist, we retain our universal respect for he or she that stands out while making sure that he or she stands out for contributions to the whole.

We often fear the future because it holds so much that is unknown.  Consider that with the neotenization of society, the future may feature many characteristics of the past.  Aboriginal music may become Youtube hits.  Ongoing ritualized creativity may become the norm.  Craft may re-emerge in life.

That which is unique about America may metamorphosize and become that which becomes unique about our species:  a reverence for the individual that makes a creative contribution to the whole.

Rosanna and I are conducting an overview of matrifocal societies around the world, seeking correlations with the primary elements of the thesis.  I’m estimating that a matrifocal society will have females with higher testosterone and higher estrogen than a modern conventional society, males with lower testosterone and lower estrogen, more frequent anomalous cerebral dominance with both cerebral hemispheres more often the same size, a leftward shift of Annett’s handedness distributions (more left-handers), delayed puberty and tendencies to exhibit specific diseases and conditions characterized by the hormonal tendencies just mentioned.

There is the possibility that matrifocal societies will have language structures characterized by an emphasis on the present tense as in the Hopi and Trobriand Islanders.  This would suggest an affinity to primary process in waking consciousness:  one time, one place, no negatives.  An implication might be a different kind of sense of humor and a possible different kind of creative imagination.

Elia and I were talking last night about the relevance of myth.  Elia suggested that the structure of the mythology of matrifocal societies may reflect the unique neurological constellation we are proposing.  We considered that the myths might show a single story line, main character almost always present (no cut away to other times or places), little exhibition of a theory of mind in gods or goddesses and few references to other myths or stories.

A position taken in the more detailed piece, “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” is that aboriginal matrifocal societies will exhibit populations with larger percentages of people exhibiting conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism and Asperger’s.  I’m estimating that a caveat to that position might be necessary.  There might be such increases and increases in diseases featuring high estrogen and testosterone women, low estrogen and testosterone men, only if there have been radical changes in child rearing practices accompanied by sudden diet and environmental rhythm modifications.

I’m starting to consider that the highly ritualized environment of aboriginal matrifocal societies, along with the ways children are raised and what they are fed, are preventing the further leftward shift of infants and toddlers.  These conventions might be engaging young neurologies in ways that there is far less autism, fewer people lost in an isolated, waking, primary process.

This thesis would suggest that aboriginal children taken from their mothers at birth or shortly thereafter, adopted by a conventional, modern, patrifocal family, might show high percentages of conditions exhibiting maturational delay and diseases associated with the hormonal extremes this thesis has been tracking.

Whereas matrifocal societies embracing modern culture will more likely exhibit the kinds of disease and condition anomalies this thesis proposes, aboriginal matrifocal societies will manifest these derivations far less often.

Perhaps the most profound connotation is that moderns raising their children using aboriginal techniques (constant rhythm, ritualized behaviors, specialized diet, unique touch or kinesthetic conventions), particularly those women with high testosterone levels mating with males with low testosterone levels, could reduce the number of children unable to exit from primary process, the maturational delayed, the autistic.

This is another suggestion of the ouroboros, the snake with her tail within her mouth, a thesis that suggests that aboriginal child rearing practices may usefully inform a society with an increasing number of neotenous characteristics with matrifocal tendencies.  This feels right to me.  Just as the features of our infant forebears manifest in the contemporary features of our species, what we would call classic neoteny, there are possible signs that characteristics of our societal forebears, aboriginal matrifocal societies, are characteristics that may usefully inform the features of contemporary times.

According to this thesis, tattoos and piercings among our youth will likely lead to other aboriginal borrowings.  I would watch for an increase in ritualized behaviors.  Music has reflected aboriginal themes for decades.  If our young mothers and fathers were to start changing the way they raise their children, how might conventional ancient practices be reflected in modern practice?

Connections between the past and present seem to be growing stronger.  There may be a reason for this.  Our future may be integrally tied to our ancient past.

The Growing Concern, like the Bread Shop Kitchen, specialized in vegetarian cuisine.  We served Chicago’s North Side new age community.  Palm readers, activists, astrologists and all kinds of spiritual path practitioners visited us for our casseroles and freshly squeezed juice.

The manager of The Growing Concern was a devout Sikh, dressed in turban, white cotton with full beard, a former hippie Westerner who had converted.  Arthur was the owner.  Arthur was a concert violinist with a passion for food.  Portly, dressing in professorial neo hippie, Arthur wore a beret and smoked a pipe.

Business was slow.  Arthur the owner began driving taxi to pay the bills.

At about the time Arthur started driving taxi, the manager was let go.  Business was very slow.  Eric, the other cook, and I were now the sole employees.  We were the cooks and wait staff.

Eric was a follower of a local guru.  It seemed pretty much anybody connected to or patronizing The Growing Concern was exploring alternative spirituality.  I was sort of the odd guy out, spending most of my spare time illustrating a line of greeting cards I was about to publish.  Still, it was a wonderful place to observe a unique community.  Eric and I pretty much could do whatever we wanted regarding the menu, specials and food preparation.  Arthur was out driving fares.  What we wanted to make, we made.  Arthur was delighted that for what it cost to have two cooks he also got management and wait staff.

Eric and I became good friends.  With lots of time to talk, we explored each other’s interests.  I learned about astrology.  Eric learned about Neuro-linguistic Programming.  We were both trained artists.  Eric was interested in the greeting card company I was putting together.

Some days there were maybe ten customers.  We had lots of time to talk.

The Growing Concern closed its doors, and Eric and I looked for other jobs.  I published my illustrations as greeting cards, calling the company Maplands, and I found myself able to make a living selling the cards of other small greeting card companies as I went from store to store with my own.  Eric contributed several images to my tiny firm.  Soon, sales reps across the country were placing our illustrations in city and college town stores.

Thirty years later, I still get emails from folks expressing appreciation for their Maplands cards.

Eric became enamored of the communications model I’d been exploring, Neuro-linguistic Programming.  In 1980, I went through the training program, becoming a licensed practitioner.  The next year Eric proceeded to do the same.  Only Eric immediately began practicing professionally, becoming a Neuro-linguistic psychotherapist.  Then he became a consultant to corporations.  Then Eric started writing books.  Eric Klein is now a widely respected author and consultant.

I’ve always felt restaurant work to be deeply rewarding.  I meet fascinating people, experience adventures, get to be around food, prepare food, serve food and eat food.  I have one speed when I cook at home, restaurant speed, lickety-split.  I don’t cook often.  Marcia is a real cook, preparing her dishes with artistry and affection.  I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned.  For me, cooking was never about the art, but about the atmosphere.  A kitchen is the center of a home.

I’d been cooking at the Bread Shop Kitchen for several months, mostly preparing egg dishes in the morning shift, when I was directed to take a lie detector test or be fired.  There had been a theft of the change box in the basement.  It had occurred during my shift.  It was 1979.

I took the el downtown and elevatored up to a higher floor in one of the newer towers.  I was asked to sit in a chair in a little room with lots of one-way glass.  My fingers and chest were attached to the mechanical apparatus.  I was given a little glass of water.

There was one man in the room with me.  He looked like a football player in a suit.  He began by wanting to know if I had ever stolen anything in my life.  He then asked me if I had been subjected to a lie detection test in the past.

Perhaps four years earlier, in St Petersburg, Florida, where I was a student at Eckerd College, my friend Linda had asked me if I would participate in a psychology experiment.  Her professor was comparing type A and type B personalities regarding stress.  My friend regarded me as a classic type B.  She wired me up to a detection apparatus, not unlike the lie detector test machinery, and gave me a series of tests.

At that point, I had been meditating enough years that my natural abilities to voluntarily associate or dissociate were somewhat enhanced.  When Linda had me dip my right hand and arm completely into an ice-filled cistern, instructing me to remove my arm when it was too uncomfortable to continue, I associated, meditating in my body.  I did not withdraw my arm until after several minutes when they told me that time was up.

When Linda instructed me to solve a series of word problems, I could find no solutions.  Totally in my head, I began to panic, feeling my heart rate and perspiration rocket.

I saw Linda on campus a few days later.  I asked her how the experiments were going.  She told me they were going well, but they had to toss out my specific test results.  My responses were not fitting the established categories.

Sitting in the loop tower little room with one way windows, I could feel fear and fury at the situation I was in.  I felt accused of a crime I hadn’t committed, submitting to probes I didn’t respect.  I decided to quasi-cooperate.  As the first questions came, I went to full meditation mode.  At this point, I had several years of experience calming and centering myself.  The grey-suited man asked me if I had ever stolen anything.

I had never stolen anything.  I was obsessively, neurotically honest.  I even felt guilty when I exaggerated.  I had always had difficulty with language with all its nuances, all its multiple connotations, some of which were less true than others.  My whole life I had struggled with an obsessive conscience that wanted to make sure I broke no rules regarding truth.

“No, I have never stolen anything,” I replied.  The heartbeat and perspiration detectors remained calm.  I felt calm.

The questions continued.  Some questions were asked several ways.  Another suited man came into the room.  The two together asked questions.  Then one began accusing me of the crime.  He left.  Another man came in.  The accusations grew more strident.  I remained calm.  For almost an hour, these three men behaved like they’d found the criminal, attacking me in a number of different ways.

They seemed annoyed, yet confident.  The session ended.

Later in the week, Kate, The Bread Shop Kitchen owner, walked up to me after I had finished work.

“You flunked the lie detector test,” said Kate.  She revealed no emotion with her statement.  I was confused.  How could I have flunked?  I had told the truth.

Kate told other staff members I had flunked.  I was offered an opportunity to take the test a second time.

I suggested that it was possible that they had interpreted my meditation state as an attempt to not cooperate, with calm being interpreted as having committed the theft.  It was true that it was my goal that their machinery show no variations with their questions.  It was agreed I take the test again.

The next week, back at the lie detector agency, back in the same little room, they again hooked me up to the lie detecting apparatus.  This time, rather than meditating, I placed my whole consciousness in my head, withdrawing from my body.  It was like taking the word problems at college a few years before.  I chose not to be consciously present.

I felt terrified.

I sweated like I was in a marathon, heartbeat racing like I was running miles.  Again, the questions.  And, the same answers as before.  “No, I have never stolen anything.”

There was one question different from the questions from the week before….

“Does this experience remind you of anything in particular?” asked the grey-suited man.

“Yes, it reminds me of what I’ve read about Nazi Germany.  This reminds me of people put to death because of lies.”

I was sent home a second time.  The next day, Kate took me aside and told me that she had been told the results of the second test were inconclusive.

The next week was my review and pay raise.  I was not aware of anyone that did not receive a pay raise at their first review.  I was an excellent cook, always on time and I performed my job well.

The pay raise was denied.

It was clear that I was not trusted.  I resigned.

The friends I’d made working in the restaurant were very supportive.  Management was happy to see me go.  It got back to me that Kate had told the staff that she believed I had committed the theft.

The next month, I received a copy of Communities, a magazine on communes, intentional communities and experiments in group living.  The cover of the magazine was an illustration I had sent them many months before.  Accompanying the illustration, on the inside cover, was a description of The Bread Shop Kitchen, written my first week on the job.  I described the satisfaction of working in a communal situation, and I described the synergies that accompanied merging work with social change.

After I left the Bread Shop Kitchen, I applied to a health food vegetarian restaurant up the street on Clark near Belmont.  The Growing Concern would be the last of my ten restaurant jobs.

After graduating from college, I made it a year and a quarter working with my dad learning how to run a girdle and bra manufacturing plant.  I quit so that I could try to make it as a free lance illustrator and graphic designer.  Unable to pay bills on the few jobs I was getting, I applied to cook in the Bread Shop Kitchen, across from the Bread Shop near Roscoe and Halstead.  This was in 1978.

When I applied, I thought the business was quasi-communal.  I’d been fascinated by communes and intentional communities for several years, never having lived in one, but I had visited several.  After working there a bit I realized The Bread Shop was a privately owned concern with bosses and disgruntled employees.  I focused on cooking, which I was good at and enjoyed.  I liked the people, who were hippies, gays and counter-culture food fanatics.

The grocery store that spawned the restaurant had started as a communal operation but had evolved to a sole proprietorship.  There were politics and hurt feelings, but that had all unfolded and had sort of been resolved before I arrived.  What was left over was an odd assortment of rules, deep suspicions and a staff that sought to make believe that it was the staff in control, not the owner.

Stuff got done more or less professionally.  In Florida, every restaurant was roach-infested.  Once, in the Bo Tree where I worked in Florida, a roach ended up in someone’s lasagna.  The health officials visited us the next day.  They were pretty relaxed.  They told us cooks and the wait staff to wear shoes.  At the Bread Shop Kitchen we had rats.  We left poison for them in the basement, though all that was in the basement were canned goods and daily cash receipts.  We placed poison in the kitchen corners and underneath the stove.

One evening rush, a rat staggered out from beneath the stove, tongue hanging out of its mouth.  It made its way to the open door leading to the dining room.  The three of us in the kitchen watched, frozen in place.  Evidently the rat had just eaten poison.  I hesitated to chase it, fearing it would scurry into the dining room.  I hesitated to even get near it.  The rat decided the dining room was where it wanted to be.

Most of the tables were filled with patrons when the rat slowly walked into the room.  It made its way to the nearest table, crawled between two people and leaned up against the center pole of the table.  There it huffed and puffed, breathing with difficulty.

Not a single person in the dining room had observed the journey.  In the kitchen, we didn’t want to be seen observing the rat, fearing we’d alert diners to look where we were looking, so we copped quick, surreptitious glances.

The rat died.  One by one the diners left, none the wiser.

It wasn’t long after that that I arrived at work to be told that the day before there had been a theft.  Someone (likely a staff member, according to the owner) had gone into the basement and robbed the change box.  All staff who’d worked that day were to be given lie detector tests.  The boss told us that this was written into a document we were provided when we applied for the job.  We take the test or we were fired.

I made an appointment to travel downtown to take the test.

In the 1970s, Florida had laws that prevented citizens from driving cars like mine.  Inspections kept them off the road.  My car was registered in Illinois with an Illinois license plate.  My dad owned it and paid the insurance.  Not that the car had value.  Still, it got around.

It was an old 1960s Chevy Nova with eight cylinders.  Small car with eight cylinders.  Hard to imagine.  We’d often cram six in and go searching for breakfast before the sunrise.  I frequently gave friends rides to the airport.  I loaned it to any friend or anybody that needed wheels.

I lived near the ocean the two years I worked restaurants, the two years I took off from college between my junior and senior years.  The first few years of the car’s life were spent in Chicago suburbs gathering salt from liberally sprinkled, suburban city streets.  In St. Petersburg, the ocean salt continued to deteriorate the chassis.  There was a love bug insect plague in 1971.  Once smacked by my car, these bugs left behind fluids that repeatedly impinged on all forward-facing surfaces of the vehicle and caused all the blue paint in the grill area to peel off, leaving a former owner’s white paint exterior to show through.  The car looked like it was smiling through a milk moustache.

The humid Florida weather grew a layer of mold across the ceiling of my vehicle.  The floor grew crusted with debris.  Roaches lived beneath the seats.

With time, the right front chassis strut totally deteriorated and the right front side of the car, the front-seat passenger position, dropped a couple inches.  Then the metal floor ate through, where the front passenger sat, and we covered the floor with cardboard to keep debris from bouncing into the car.  At one point the cardboard crumpled and we placed a yellow raincoat over the hole.

I remember one rainy afternoon, passengers in front and back, when hit a puddle during a rainstorm with V8 speed.  Water from the puddle slammed against the bottom of the car, into the car, propelled the raincoat on the floor into the air and into the backseat where my visiting sister was sitting, drenching the passenger in the front, with the raincoat finally draped over my sister’s head.

On a sunny, summer St. Pete day I was dropping a friend off at Tampa’s airport.  I had just applied for and got a job in a Black Angus restaurant.  I was to start the next day.  I somehow lost or misplaced my driver’s license, and I was stopped for speeding by an airport security car.  The cop didn’t know what to do; I had no identification.  He told me to follow his car and that he would lead me to the Tampa Police Station a couple miles away.  At the police station, I parked my car and followed him in.

The Tampa police told my officer to go back to the airport.  After he left, they laughed in derision that he’d actually had me follow him instead of arresting me and having my car towed.  They arrested me and gave me one phone call.

I couldn’t get hold of my dad.  Hours later they gave me a second call.  I couldn’t get hold of my dad’s mom.  I left a message that it was kind of an emergency and I would call back.

I didn’t get that opportunity until the next day.

In the meantime, I was in a cell with about 25 guys, mostly black, receiving two baloney sandwiches for each of the three meals of the day.  With breakfast, I received a cup of coffee with my baloney sandwich.

One guy asked me what I was in for.  “Speeding,” I said.

“Whoa,” said the guy.  “How fast were you going?”

I noted that I didn’t have my license on me.  “Bummer,” he said.

After 24 hours, I got hold of my dad.  He wired $300 and I walked out to the parking lot and retrieved my car.  I drove home to discover my friends concerned and confused.

Evidently the person I left a message with at my grandmother’s place had told my grandmother that I had called and that it was an emergency.  She called my house in St. Pete.  I was not there.  She called the St. Petersburg police.  They came to my house and rang the bell.

During the delay before the door was answered, all bags of weed were dumped into the toilet and flushed.  When the door was opened, my housemates discovered the police were looking for me.  They, of course, had no idea I was in the Tampa jail.

When I arrived home after being gone all night, I found that they’d assumed I was dead or messed up in some major way.  Deeply relieved I was OK, seeking celebration, they realized all their weed was gone.

I called the Black Angus.  I’d missed a good chunk of my first day at work and wanted to know if my new boss still wanted me to come in that day.  He asked what had happened.  I told him.  I’d been stopped for speeding without my license and had spent the night in jail.  I was told not to bother coming in, that the job had been filled.

Go figure.  I thought that was a pretty good excuse.

The kitchen cook needed an assistant.  Bob hired me on the spot.  He needed someone now.  I put on the white cook costume and walked up to the line, noted the fryers (we had no fryers at the Bo Tree) and asked Bob what those were.  He glared at me.

“Where did you cook?”

I mumbled, “I cooked at the Bo Tree, over on 22nd and 34th Street.  I cooked vegetarian food.”

It was very confusing at first, juggling dozens of orders coming in from the breakfast room that opened out onto the pool patio overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.  Waitresses barked their orders at me and clipped them to the revolving carousel.  Slowly I developed short-order reflexes.  I went from slow and confused to quick and less confused to lightning fast and unconscious.  I loved to have a woman tell me what she wanted and then I pleased her.  I still couldn’t embark in the sexual banter that was the trademark communication between male kitchen and female wait staff, but I adored the rhythmic, quick dance of satisfaction that characterized short-order work.  I had no girlfriend.  Relationship terrified me.  Short-order felt like a satisfactory substitute.

A few weeks into my new profession, Megan, one of the attractive, younger girls, croaked out her order through the horizontal window.  She looked extremely pale.  There was a pause in the rush, and I told her she should go home.  She looked sick.

“I can’t go home.  I need the money,” she said with difficulty.  She seemed angry.

“OK,” I said, thinking she was angry at me.

“I need the money.  I had an abortion this morning.  I need the money to pay for the abortion.”

The café served only breakfast and lunch.  Breaking down around 3:00 p.m., the day’s production often provided leftovers I could take home.  This day there was a stack of blueberry muffins they were going to throw out.  I bagged up maybe a dozen, walked out the side door into the parking lot and then another 20 yards to the white sand beach.  Cranes and pelicans circled overhead.  Seagulls scurried along the shore.  I walked a ways along the waves headed north and then toward the bars.  Reaching the road, I half consciously began pulling out muffins, breaking them up in my hands and tossing crumbs to sea gulls.  I wasn’t paying attention.  I was thinking about Megan.  Then the noise hit me like a wave and I realized there were perhaps four or five dozen seagulls flying above me, walking around me, screaming for muffins.  I reflexively grabbed several, crumbling them, throwing them, and there was chaos.

A hundred seagulls were swarming me for muffins.  I had no idea blueberry muffins to a seagull were like honey to a bee.  They were screaming.  Wings were beating in my ears.

Hunching down, grabbing the last muffins out of the bag, I threw them as far from me as I could.  They landed in the road.  The seagulls swarmed the road.  There were cars.

I did not cause an accident, but there were fatalities.  Three of the seagulls were dead.

I buried them in the beach.

I walked back to the Hilton where my car was parked.  I drove my beat-up Chevy home.

The commune that ran the Bo Tree restaurant was located in a big house about four blocks from the restaurant.  It was an odd little enclave of about ten people and some cats.  This was St.  Petersburg, Florida, 1975.  We had no air conditioning.  Avocados fell like leaves from city trees.  Fleas and roaches were deeply integrated into our lives.  It was hot.

I only worked for the commune.  I did not live there.  I lived with friends a few miles away, near the intercoastal waterway, behind a Mr. Donut.  Rising in the morning, I’d arrive at work as the sole employee, the director of the kitchen.  I was paid the handsome sum of $50 a week.  This was controversial.  Some commune members thought I should not be paid.  But no one wanted to take responsibility for getting things done, hence my elevated station.

As head cook, the guy that baked the bread, prepared the staples and put together the daily specials, I built skills that would later get me cook jobs.  Commune members would drift in and out, volunteering to participate in preparations.  Things were very relaxed.  We often wore no shoes.

It was an entertaining and an odd place to spend the day.  I am very allergic to flour, yet my job was to bake the bread.  I remember sneezing without ceasing for minutes at a time while kneading and making flour into loaves.

On one occasion, I was offered magic shrooms while cleaning up for the day.  While making my way through a large stack of pots, skillets and dishes, the mushrooms took effect.  The sloshing, sudsy water took on intonation patterns and began slurring words while plates got wiped.  As dishes transformed, so did the garble of the water.  I found myself listening to the dishwater speaking in perfect London British dialect, except the words themselves were not quite clear enough to understand.

On occasion, 35 years later, I still occasionally notice dishwater speaking in language dialects.  Undrugged, I note the intonation details have been removed along with the crumbs and smears from the dirty dishes.

The particular mix of hippies that made up the commune I worked for had no binding theology or leader, but they shared a deep respect for fasting.  It was a peculiar mix.  They ran the restaurant and a health food grocery next door, but they revered those members that could go long stretches drinking only water, eating nothing.  One girl ate nothing for over 20 days.  She was their hero.

Bookkeeping was lethargic, like the St. Peter summer.  Attention to detail was wobbly.  Folks sometimes took responsibility consistently for a particular section of the store or restaurant.  Attention wavered.  Roaches were everywhere.  Both kinds.  It was Florida.  There were also bees.

One summer day, a 500-pound drum of honey was delivered for bulk sales.  Stationed toward the front of the grocery, that barrel of honey was a sweet source of income.  The evening of its delivery we all locked up.  The grocery guys locked their door.  I locked mine.

Next morning, I opened up the restaurant side while the store folks unlocked the grocery.  Someone had left the honey drum’s tap in the up position.  Overnight, very slowly, almost 500 pounds of honey leisurely dribbled onto the store floor to disperse over every inch of wooden boards.

It took some time with buckets, rags and towels to get the honey up, get it out from between the floor boards and purge the store of an abundance of sweetness.  Over the course of the day, we filled the dumpster in the alley with almost 500 pounds of honey-infused rags and towels.  It was an all-day job.  We went home tired.

It was 1975.  It was hot.  No one I knew had air conditioning.  I certainly didn’t have air conditioning in my beat up Chevy.  The next morning, I was about three or four blocks away from the restaurant when I noticed, while driving, that there seemed to be a lot of bees around.  Rounding the corner to the restaurant, I noticed more bees.  It wasn’t until I walked into the restaurant that I realized that bees were everywhere.  And, they were happy bees.

The store was closed.  No one could get anything done; there were so many bees.  They had been making their way in through cracks in the back screen door.  Standing in the restaurant, I could hear through the store a deep thrumbing coming from the alley.

I walked outside through the front door, and then I went round back and observed around the dumpster a great bee festival.  If my dishes had been talking in British dialect, the dumpster was mumbing in god language with vowels rolling across the neighborhood in sweet, thunderous bee applause.  They were elated.

Not surprisingly, the commune found it difficult to afford to keep me.  As the kitchen manager and sole employee, I had to fire myself to save them the $50 a week.  Nevertheless, I’d learned that a person could sneeze almost thirty times in a row and not die, that dishwater is British and humans can do things that make bees feel loved.  It was great preparation for my next job, short-order cook in a Hilton Hotel.

Traveling across country, I search for waffle houses to eat a meal.  I’m not big on the menu, but I love the show.  Watching a talented short-order cook work the rush is a deep pleasure.

I first started working in restaurants when I was 17.  My last cook job was in 1981 when I was 29.  Over the course of ten jobs starting as bus boy and car parker, ending up as a cook, I developed an appreciation for the skills of a talented short-order cook.

Five of those ten restaurant jobs were as a cook, three as a specialist in vegetarian cuisine.  I also worked making pizza in a Pizza Hut and Barnabe’s, but pizza preparation doesn’t count as cooking.

I was a waiter at the Happy Dolphin, a resort on the beach at St. Petersburg Beach in Florida.  It was during a two-year break from school between my junior and senior years.  What I really wanted to do was to be the short-order cook.  I had only worked as bus boy, car parker, waiter and pizza maker at that point in my career.  I looked at cooking as the pinnacle of restaurant work.

At the Happy Dolphin, there was the full service fancy restaurant offering supper to vacationers.  Then there was the Happy Dolphin diner serving mostly locals with hangovers when the bars closed.  I wanted to be briskly cooking eggs and burgers, serving seamlessly a dozen late night nibblers.  Cooking, for me, was where it was at.

I felt less drawn toward preparing food in the fancy kitchen.  I had worked closely with line cooks when I’d been their dishwasher two years before, in the summer in between my freshman and sophomore years when I was still in college.  Bob, the head cook, yelled a sizable percentage of the time.  Bob’s wife was a waitress.  Bob and Susan would lambast each other in the middle of rushes.  Lots of yelling.  Still, there was also good-natured sexual harassment.  I wasn’t one that knew how to engage in the playful sexual innuendos.  The environment, though stimulating, was confusing.  I had a hard time differentiating the play from anger.

In the diner, the short-order cook, Mac, was a deeply mottled and pocked, purple-faced, middle-aged man, scarred by a severe skin condition.  On breaks from my job I would linger and watch him work.  I was scared to talk to him.  He glared at me, suggesting I should go, but he never asked me to go.  His talent for the lightning fast production of a meal, never fazed by multiple demands, was a skill I longed to master.  I watched him closely with respect.

For nine months I was a waiter in the fancy restaurant.  Nine months I’d stop in on Mac and watch him work.  We never talked.  Turnover was so brisk in the restaurant that by the end, I was the second-most senior employee on the floor.  I’d saved enough money to take several months off to read, draw and spend time with friends.  On my last day, I stopped to say bye to Mac, mentioning that I had always wanted to learn to do short order.  When I said good bye his side was turned toward me as he worked the grill.  He stopped cooking.

Turning toward me, face on, he screamed, “Why the fuck didn’t you say you wanted to learn to cook?  You think I can read your fucking mind?”

I felt horrible, like I had committed an act of inhumanity.  I resolved to pay attention to situations where I could ask for something from someone that would also make the other person feel good.  I was unaware that Mac sought relationship.  I let his infirmity and demeanor get in the way.

I spent the Florida spring and summer reading and drawing.  That fall I got hired as the sole paid employee of a Florida commune that also ran a restaurant, The Bo Tree.  They needed someone that would show up on time and take responsibility for the kitchen.  I was hired to cook.

I wake up in the morning around 5:30 to 6:15 and shuffle down fifteen steps to my desk.  I work out of my home.  I put in about three hours until the staff starts to arrive.  During those three hours I read over online papers and blogs, preparing the day’s lists for the staff, and then I jump into writing.  I write for an hour or two, sometimes longer.  I often have little idea what I’m going to write about when I begin.  Like now.

When Marcia and I last went traveling, as soon as we shifted to the Eastern Time Zone, I woke up on the button at 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.  Every morning, with no alarm clock, my eyes popped open at 5:30 a.m. during the whole vacation.  So I wrote each morning.

What was odd is that my unconscious made a seamless transition to Eastern Time while we were headed east, but when we crossed the Indiana timeline back into the Central Time Zone, I then woke up at 4:30 in the morning, 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.  Somehow, I was not transitioning easily back to Central.  I have an internal alarm clock that works faultlessly, but it is strangely relaxed about which time zone I might be in.

My dad and I were sitting on opposites sides of my wife at our favorite bar/burger joint, Beinlich’s, in Northbrook.  I could not hear a word my dad was saying.  I’m not sure he was hearing me.  I proposed we switch positions so that both of them would be on my good side with the ear that hears well.  I then found out my dad has a bad ear, the opposite one from mine.  So, by switching positions and having Marcia stay seated, my dad and I were both able to hear each other easily, our good ears now pointed at each other.  Part of the dance of growing older.

My father, my son and I went on a houseboat fishing trip up near Oshkosh about ten years ago.  The boat had a toilet, beds and everything.  We tooled around the Fox River and some lakes, not catching much.  Toward the end, we watched a remarkable display of meteorites from the houseboat roof while listening to the harmonies of heavy metal from some serious partyers from across the lake.  I’m not sure how it came up in conversation, but it being the evening of the fourth day, I discovered my father had not taken a crap.  Neither had I.  My butt is very particular about where it chooses to unload.  Then, to my dad’s and my astonishment, Elia revealed he had not dumped.  Three generations of Lehman males, all disposed to not go to the bathroom in an unfamiliar environment, all unaware that the others were similarly possessed.

Consciously, I have no problem with strange toilets.  It’s just that I experience absolutely no urge to take a crap unless I’m home or in a place my gut has decided is a close enough approximation.  Why some places qualify and others don’t is not always clear to me.

With my first wife, if I was really pissed, I’d find myself yelling “Terry!”  My sister’s name is Terry.  My sister Terry, when she’s furious at her husband, Craig, tells me she finds herself yelling “Andrew!”  In both cases, we find ourselves less angry, feeling like idiots for confusing our childhoods with present day.

There’s this weird thing that happens.  Sometimes my son tells me a dream he’s just had and it directly relates to what I was doing during his dream.  It’s happened so often it’s become routine.  On more than one occasion I woke from a dream as my wife awoke.  She told me her dream.  It was the same dream that I was having.

It’s happened I’ve awakened thinking I was another age, for example, 20.  Lying there at 20 I suddenly remember I’m whatever, say 45.  Then the intervening years all come rushing in.  In dreams, I’m often a girl, only to wake up a boy.  In dreams I’m sometimes an animal, only to awaken human.  In dreams, I sometimes realize I’m dreaming and am aware that I am in primary process consciousness with one time, one place and no negatives, unable to read, living in a world that in every detail is created by my unconscious.  There is perhaps no feeling more secure than to know your greater self is totally in control.

In one dream I saw a friend while I was aware I was dreaming.  I asked her if she was aware that she was dreaming and was this also her dream.  She said yes.  When I awoke, I went and found her and asked her if she remembered the dream.  “No,” she said.  She was amused.

Sometimes my son has lucid dreams where I am with him in his dream, and he thinks it might be a dream I am also having.  So far, I don’t remember the dreams he thinks we might have shared.

Often I’ve dreamed I woke up to look at the clock and then went back to sleep to later discover upon waking that it was a dream.  Sometimes I can’t figure out if it was a dream or not.  More and more often I can’t tell ancient dreams from early memories.  There is a blurring of past dreams with past.

I’m feeling like my life is an instrument being played by a musician, my unconscious.  A common theme is the one where I am played to make believe that I, as conscious, am alone.  I’m not exactly clear why this particular song is so entertaining.  But it’s becoming clear that awake is often not aware, and asleep is not unconscious.  I’m looking forward to when awake becomes fully conscious, and dreaming becomes a lucid part of my everyday.

In the meantime, I’ll awaken at 4:30 or 5:30 in a time zone that my mind finds comfortable that morning.  Writing in the morning is relatively easy.  It’s not always clear when I’m awake.

In the previous four pieces, I’ve been exploring the federal government founding, funding and maintaining new job-creation institutions.  The government would reward individuals gathering respect in the form of traffic and time spent on websites serving media, education and art.  The government would not decide who would receive micropayments for each visitor and how long they spent on the site or watching a video.  That would be decided by the traffic numbers.  This is a model that trusts the wisdom of the crowd’s redistributing the crowd’s tax dollars to those whose work the crowd admires.

There would be the generation of high quality news by amateurs and professionals across the planet, high quality educational pieces as determined by the testing scores of viewers and popular art as determined by the number of people lingering over the artists’ work.

Performers might be employed to act out an academic’s lecture scripts.  News might be describing surges in a particular artist’s traffic numbers.  Performers might be reading news.  Art might bleed into academia.  Synergies among the different institutions are inevitable.  Government rewards for traffic and duration will encourage innovation and novelty.

As these new institutions acquire mass, government funding for their providers can moderate.  Consistent high traffic sites can survive on ad revenue models.  Regardless, a redistribution of dollars from taxpayers to these providers of content enhances the experience of taxpayers and the academics, journalists and artists participating in the model.

As the consumer economy continues to deteriorate, the focus of the individual will not be on what he or she owns and does not yet own.  Their attention will be on their personal experience.  The aesthetic economy, the economy driven by enhanced personal experience, will be nurtured by a surge in teachers, news providers and artists that are paid to perform.  What kind of government could display the kind of flexibility and creativity required to distribute its power horizontally, encouraging a world where decisions are made from the bottom, not the top?

Imagine a government funding personal empowerment.  Instead of congregating power in the hands of semi-permanently stationed elected officials influenced by elite institutions and the wealthy, consider a tenuous government in which the elected officials are kept in office for as long as they have the support of their constituencies.  There are no term limits.  An elected official might only keep his or her office overnight. Positions can change at any time, based upon information gathered off the web interfaces.  Voters constantly note their positions.  Politicians constantly respond to those notations.

In addition to paying the salaries of elected officials, the government would also pay lobbyists.

Individuals would specialize in aggregating the votes of citizens, packaging them into ad hoc groups of votes managed by that individual, the lobbyist.  Any voter could give his or her voting rights, to be taken back at any time, to the lobbyist.  Any lobbyist could specialize in any issue or issues, collecting the voting rights of voters and using the collected rights to pressure elected officials to vote specific ways, even yanking support for an official and giving it to an alternative elected official, thus forcing shifts in representation.

Voters can assign their votes to be used by different lobbyists at different times, one lobbyist per citizen.  Lobbyists can use their aggregated power to influence elected officials.  Elected officials can change as frequently as their constituency chooses someone new.

The government rewards lobbyists with a fee based upon the number of voters they represent.  Lobbyists can support themselves by acquiring a large enough following of voters to work full time.

A constant shift in power is integrated into the system as voters become lobbyists, lobbyists become politicians and politicians get replaced based upon how the population rates their performance at any time.

Though this could be used to support the two-party system, there is no default understanding that parties are even required.  Politics becomes issue-based as lobbyists constantly emerge that are committed to specific issues, often focused on specific date-based issues or events.  Imagine a world where online social networking is used by almost everyone, a high quality media keeps the population informed and a high quality educational system makes sure people respect an educated response.  In this world with freely distributed, high quality information, the government funds free and easy access to information distribution by encouraging citizen lobbying and a responsive legislature.  All of the details of a citizen-lobbyist-driven government would be mediated online.

An online world is a horizontal world.  Hierarchies can topple in many ways.  By building into the system high degrees of responsiveness, transparency and diversity, we provide the potential for citizen empowerment to degrees not imaginable until now.

As our federal government seeks ways to create jobs, officials can also utilize current surges in new technologies to create new institutions.  Media, education, art and politics can all transform to adjust to the present conditions.  It takes a little imagination.  It takes an understanding that the consumer economy is ending.  It takes trust that there are good things on the way.

Welcome to the Aesthetic Economy.

There is a paradox of government-funded arts in the West.  We in the West don’t believe we should encourage failure.  Too often art reveals where we don’t succeed.  Why would government support those that don’t agree with the ideology of success?

Ostensibly, government supports “free markets,” or the cult of the entrepreneur, by allowing the imaginative cutthroats to cut throats imaginatively, resulting in the financial debacle we observe today.  Americans revere the man that makes money, seeing the vibrant corporation as a symbol of independence, liberty and freedom.

Then there are the artists.  The Western artist also depicts the American obsession with independence, liberty and freedom.  Only the artist through his and her very life and work depicts the repercussion of a desire to integrate the artistic default experience of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self with the American experience of separation, monetary stratification, independence, liberty and freedom.  The Western artist is presented with a paradox.  How does he or she manifest interconnection, or connection to that which transcends normal experience, in a society that deifies the alone?

Art often calls attention to this paradox, what might be also expressed as a cultural incongruity.  The Left does not see a problem with paying people to share their insights on those struggles that make up our lives.  The Right generally is against funding perspectives that don’t share in the myth of our entrepreneurial independence.

Of the many ways available to describe the transformation that is underway, the phrases “return of the commons” and “media is the message” summarize where we are headed.  We are becoming horizontal at breakneck speed as national and international consciousness refocuses on safety nets, government-supported programs and job creation.  High degrees of stratification are about to flatten as the zeitgeist turns toward punishing the capitalist mythology that the wealthy represent, those that have achieved our dream.  Our dreams are changing.  We are growing to revere relationship.  The commons emphasizes the utilization of our connections to engender security.  The wealthy are on the brink of being demonized.  Watch how the wealthy respond when the government penalizes wealth.  Observe the media response.  The commons is coming back with a vengeance.

The media that is the message for our time is the many-to-many new technologies such as the net and cell phone communications.  Transparency, diversity and horizontal communication are integral to this new wave in interaction.  How can the government use these new technologies as we transition to a “commons” frame of reference so that artists can be employed and supported?

Former barriers to artist employment are being shattered by the destruction of the entrepreneurial paradigm.  Artists will no longer be pariahs suggesting where our hypocrisies are buried.  We can again turn to those who specialize in providing insight into our predicament.  The Internet can enhance and encourage our turning in our artists’ direction.

Right now art is proliferating across the web at an astonishing rate and is being produced by “amateurs,” young people paying their bills in other ways.  Consider how the government can best reward those whose work is receiving acclaim in the form of website hits and visitor duration.  Don’t let the government decide who receives a basic wage to produce art full time.  Let traffic make that decision.  By government rewarding those that have gathered the respect of their net peers, art as a profession exponentially increases and others are encouraged to participate, thus fertilizing a new online institution and the world economy.

Consider that there are fewer than 100 comic strip and panel artists in this country making a living selling work to be reproduced in print.  If the government funded this miniscule profession to make it possible for 1,000 comic artists to receive a basic living by providing a penny for every visitor to their site, the comic arts would proliferate across the planet with hundreds of millions of people profiting from the artwork and insights that would result.

What if government rewarded dancers by paying dance troupes wages based on video viewings?  Those dance videos with the widest audiences could receive fees based upon traffic hits and duration.  Government does not decide who gets paid.  Government only creates the opportunities for distance to become no barrier to aesthetics, with people anywhere voting their approval by their arrival upon a site.  Then the artist is rewarded with a government microcommission.

Music, comedy and storytelling become three areas easily reimbursed.  Government allots funds for distribution.  Institutions are created.  Not only the artists, but society, are rewarded.

The paradox of art in the West is being resolved by a society that is discovering its humanity.  As the message bearers of our humanity again become respected, government can get into the business of rewarding that respect and making possible the distribution of their work.

There is no barrier to government-funded art when it again becomes possible to respect government as an institution that seeks to make lives better.

The administration is not yet thinking in terms of new institutions as it seeks places to invest borrowed dollars.  In the way they are spending some budgeted dollars, they seem to sense that the Internet is integral to future solutions, but the government seems unsure how exactly the Internet can be integral to job creation and a stable, healthy society.  In the previous piece, I show how government-supported Internet news gathering, production and distribution can form the foundation for a vibrant new societal institution.  Consider that government-supported online education can form the foundation for new institutions essential to a healthy, creative, secure, educated society.

A number of studies have come to the conclusion that the strength of a teacher’s talents for performing her or his job has more to do with the quality of a teacher’s education than any other single variable.  Bill Gates, Obama and others have emphasized the importance of training and maintaining excellent educators.  Consider that we open up this process to the web.

I’ve watched several hundred hours of college course lectures by the outstanding lecturers videotaped by The Teaching Company.  I watch and listen to these performers while exercising in the morning.  I’ve listened to an untold number of audio tape books and lectures while traveling by car.  I’ve received the equivalent of several additional college degrees of information while engaged in exercise or transportation.  Almost any of these educators were better at communicating content succinctly than the professors teaching similar subjects when I was in college.  Many of these video lectures are superb.  Somehow I slipped through four years of an undergraduate education that I adored without establishing rapport with a single professor whose work I respected.  I often designed independent studies.  I found a faculty sponsor and studied a particular subject on my own.  Classes bored me.  The passion I experienced in my chosen subjects was not uncovered by enlightened teachers, but by myself.

We can open up the education of Americans to Internet interactions with the very best teachers by producing video that can be distributed on the web.  This would be a government-supported program.  Highly rated teachers would lecture on tape at government expense.  Available on the web, these videos would be rated by number of visitors, relative popularity of subject and the test scores of viewers at the end-of-course evaluations.  Evaluations would be conducted at real-time, centrally located, physical locations with human test monitors.

All video courses would be free.  All testing would be free.  Teachers would be remunerated by the federal government based upon a formula taking into consideration base pay, Internet popularity relative to subject and student test results.

Courses requiring labs would not be conducted on the web.  Courses with small class sizes offering student/teacher interactions that train students in the art of brainstorming, human interaction and rapport could not be outsourced to the web.  Much that is done now that suppresses the emergence of great teachers would disappear when those with excellence are also Internet celebrities.  By integrating the Internet with superb lecture skills, offering a “wisdom of crowds” evaluative procedure, with funding by the federal government to make possible the wide distribution of quality information, we can achieve a stunning increase in the number of people empowered by their education.

This would be a brand new educational institution serving high schools and colleges, funded by the federal government, with testing facilities across the country.  Integrated with brick-and-mortar institutions, this federal web education program could employ amateurs, teachers without professional qualifications, if the lectures designed by an independent amateur academic are approved by a qualified professional.  Imagine a proliferation of astonishingly entertaining lectures imparting high quality information leading to high student scores.  Imagine professional performers, comedians even, memorizing lectures written by established academicians.  They could work together to create an astonishing production and receive wages for their work.

Then consider the emergence of free lance lectures by outlaw academics and amateurs.  No testing would be available.  Yet, with the proliferation of high quality information across the web, there would be a place for unorthodox perspectives pitched to a community intimate with learning from the net.

There are few pleasures that go deeper or last longer than absorbing the wholly new, integrating it with what was already understood and experiencing an unexpected synthesis.  The federal government can encourage this process, provide jobs, build new institutions and make dramatic contributions to the economic health of this country and the world.

It comes down to encouraging great teaching with new communications technologies.

Make knowledge free.  Understanding will follow.